Daniel Craig’s Worst Movie on Rotten Tomatoes is an Arthurian Legend with a Twist

When you’re trying to make a name for yourself in Hollywood, everyone has to start somewhere. It’s a reality for almost every major actor or actress: You have to start small with your roles, like Amy Adams appearing in the beauty pageant satire “Drop Dead Gorgeous” or Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” years ago. before. became an A-star. Perhaps one of the most famous examples that people love to mention is Michael Shannon very briefly playing a young Wrestlemania lover near the end of the 1993 classic comedy “Groundhog Day.” , 15 years before his Oscar-nominated role in Sam Mendes. movie “Revolutionary Path.” But not every actor’s humble beginnings are the kind of things they want to brag about.

Consider the most recent man to play 007, Daniel Craig. Craig was a well-known British actor before he was called upon to play James Bond, but most people in America thought they had first seen Craig and his craggy face in another Mendes film, the film about the Mafia’s 2002 “Road to Perdition.” Those people have probably forgotten (and Craig probably wants to forget) his first foray into American cinema, considering it’s his lowest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes. That ignominious honor goes to none other than the 1995 Disney film “A Boy in King Arthur’s Court.”

As the title suggests, “A Boy in King Arthur’s Court” was inspired by Mark Twain’s classic “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” and the basic premise is the same: What if someone from modern times could somehow travel? Go back to the time when the mythological Arthur ruled England? It’s an easy fish-out-of-water premise with a fun twist on classic Arthurian legend stories, and the mid-1990s were a good time for low-budget Disney live-action movies with an easy hook and al minus one familiar face. In the summer of 1995, when the film was released, that face was not Craig’s, but Thomas Ian Nicholas. Nicholas (at the time) was best known as the lead of the charming and underrated baseball comedy “Rookie of the Year,” and a few years later, he would be part of the cast of the hit “American Pie.” Nicholas ended up looking as lost in the role of Calvin, the eponymous boy, as the character feels in medieval England, but that’s nothing compared to two of his co-stars. See, this not only served as one of Daniel Craig’s first roles; As the photo above makes clear, his female co-star was future Oscar winner Kate Winslet.

Craig was still a few years away from becoming a moderately well-known actor, much less a global phenomenon in one of the longest-running action franchises in history. Winslet, on the other hand, had co-starred the previous year in Peter Jackson’s disturbing thriller “Heavenly Creatures,” and just a couple of months after that film’s release, she co-starred with Emma Thompson in the beloved adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility.” But in between, Winslet worked alongside Craig, and the two served as love interests in a subplot alongside Calvin trying to find his way back to the correct time period. When you think about how wild it is to see not one, but two big stars of British cinema so early in their respective careers, you might wonder how this film hasn’t appeared more frequently. Well, it helps that the movie has a whopping 5% (yeah, five percent) on Rotten Tomatoes. Even when you take into account the fact that a movie’s rating on this aggregation website doesn’t automatically mean that that’s how many critics can love a movie, per se… well, five percent is still mind-bogglingly low.

About the only nice thing you can really say about him opinions for “A Boy in King Arthur’s Court” is that there aren’t many. Even movies from almost 30 years ago get a limited number of reviews, so five percent is 22 reviews. However, if you can do your elementary math, you’ll know that means there’s only one, count ’em. one Positive review of the film, by Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times. And although he gave it a 3 out of 5, that’s not exactly praise. “This lively time-travel fantasy is the clear result of imagination and reflection,” Thomas notes, which… well, sure, that’s true, but hopefully it would be true of most good movies. The other reviews are pretty harsh, with one writer comparing it to “an hour-and-a-half video aquarium for kids” and another saying it’s “incredibly bland, homogenized, and deflated by a complete lack of wit or original charm.”

“A Boy in King Arthur’s Court” was also not a great box office success; Even with a budget of $15 million, it couldn’t even gross that much in the United States when it was released in August 1995. For Winslet, her career rebound would come extremely quickly, with the aforementioned “Senses and Sensibilities” dominating part of the awards discussion that winter and “Titanic” was only a couple of years away. For Craig, things took a little longer on the big screen. In reality, it was his breakout role. the British crime film “Layer Cake” which showed his ability to be as smooth, affable and elegant as the role of James Bond would require. These days, with his version of Bond finally underground, Craig has endeavored in different franchises such as. Benoit Blanc films, as well as in more daring independent films like this winter’s “Queer” But even as he reaches new heights in these distinctive roles, as well as in his work on stage, we must never forget (even if we want to) that the Daniel Craig’s career started off a bit down. The good news is that I had nowhere to go but up.